The Only “Competition” Slide You’ll Ever Need in a Pitch Deck

My least favorite slide in every startup’s pitch deck is the “competition” slide. It’s always some version of the same basic concept, and it’s always wrong. Worst of all, none of the entrepreneurs (and, sometimes, the investors themselves) don’t seem to realize why it’s so wrong. Are you making the same mistake in your slide deck?

For reasons beyond my understanding, entrepreneurs and investors seem to have unanimously agreed that a startup’s competition slide should use either a “magic quadrant” layout (courtesy of Gartner), or, if you’re “sophisticated,” Steve Blank’s petal diagram. But both of those ways of thinking about the competition are fundamentally flawed. Here’s why:

Why the Magic Quadrant is inherently flawed

The above image is an example of AirBnB’s “magic quadrant” competition slide. Every magic quadrant slide follows the same basic principles. The axes get labeled differently depending on the value propositions being offered to the startup’s end-users, and within each quadrant, the entrepreneur includes the logos of different companies that do some part of what the startup is claiming to do.

Naturally, no other competitor provides the identical value proposition to end-users as the startup because that would be impossible (just don’t tell Coke and Pepsi). And, of course, in the top, right corner of the image you’ll find the startup’s logo because they’re obviously the best at delivering on the value propositions they’re defining.

The problem with this way of visualizing competition should be obvious, but, for some reason, nobody seems to realize it. When the startup gets to define the two axes that represent the value by which we’re measuring all the competition, then the startup will always come out on top.

Imagine me creating an assessment metric for “best articles on Medium” and labeling the X-axis as Written by someone with first name “Aaron” and labeling the Y-axis as Written by someone with last name “Dinin.”